Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Flaws are so much more interesting to explore than excellence. Excellence is boring - why else are heroes so rarely perfect individuals? Even superheroes have to have their Achilles' heels.
And so it is when discussing books. A great book (if participants agree) becomes: "Gee, wasn't that great?" ... "Yeah." And then crickets singing in the dark. But when a story has flaws we all have different views on exactly what those flaws were, and how they should be fixed - allowing this to the 91st post rather than the third.  |
I agree with this, but for me there's something else, too. With a great book, I think it exists on its own. I don't care about how it's been influenced by the author's life or how it's a representation of its times; it has its own self-contained world. I'm not saying those things might not come up, for fun and insight, but they don't matter.
With a flawed book, though, those factors become interesting and possibly even compelling to me. It's impossible for me now not to see
The Scarlet Pimpernel and other books of its stripe as representative of a reactionary impulse in the zeitgeist. The age of the common man was dawning, and the Orczy element was resisting with all its worth. Save the nobility at all cost, pay lip service to its centuries of cruelty to the oppressed, patronize the working class. (Sally's "little mind.") So Orczy drew on her own experience as having fled a peasant uprising and cast her mind back to the start of it all, the French revolution. One wonders, as you implied above, just
what would have got the aristocrats' attention short of the Terror? France did keep returning to the kingdom/empire mode for the best part of the next century; that tendency was hard to root out for good.